Bang!
Zod swung. Jack met it head-on.
Their fists collided, and the shockwave cratered the ground beneath them—inches of rock and soil simply gone, pulverized into nothing. For a heartbeat, both men hung suspended in that frozen instant of impact, knuckles grinding against knuckles.
Then they moved again, almost in sync.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Every ounce of Kryptonian strength poured into each blow. The impacts sent Zod hurtling backward or drove Jack skidding across broken earth. They traded distance like currency—close quarters to open ground, open ground to open sky, then crashing back down to tear new furrows in the dirt. No human eye could track them. Just blurs and thunder.
Zod's original force had numbered eleven, himself included. Two had gone after Superman's mother to extract the Codex's location. Two more were operating the World Engine. Two lay dead with snapped necks. Faora-Ul had vanished somewhere during the chaos. That left three—and none of them were warriors.
They finally caught glimpses of the fight, tried to intervene, and paid for it. Jack's fists and feet found them mid-approach, or worse, stray heat vision seared across their armor. Instead of helping Zod, they became obstacles he had to work around.
"Kill them all!" Zod roared toward the human encampment.
The three remaining Kryptonians peeled off and rocketed toward the soldiers.
Jack didn't even glance in their direction.
Zod's brow furrowed. Did he truly not care if his own kind died?
Bang!
The moment of distraction cost him. Jack's fist caught him square in the jaw, and Zod went tumbling through the air—no time to stabilize, no chance to recover before Jack was already on him, one hand clamped around his ankle.
Jack swung him down.
Zod's body cratered the earth with a wet crunch of pulverized stone.
Then Jack hurled him skyward.
His toes dug into the ground. The air screamed as he launched after his prey.
Boom!
Jack slammed into Zod's back like a missile. The impact accelerated the General's ascent violently, sending him rocketing higher when he should have been falling. Every time Zod tried to stabilize, tried to arrest his momentum and descend, Jack was there—another punch, another impact, another violent shove upward.
Like kicking a hacky sack. Just keep it in the air.
The figures climbed higher and higher. Past the clouds. Into the thin blue where the air grew cold and the curve of the Earth became visible.
Boom!
Jack burst through the last layer of atmosphere, eyes already blazing. Twin lances of heat vision speared into Zod's chest.
"Ahhhhh—!"
The scream tore out of the General's throat as the beams drove him backward, accelerating him out of the atmosphere entirely—a deflating balloon tumbling into the void.
Jack hovered at the edge of space, waiting.
A few minutes passed. The cold of near-vacuum prickled against his skin, a sensation more than a threat.
Then a blazing streak fell from above—Zod, wreathed in the fire of reentry, his own heat vision lancing downward.
Jack's eyes lit up to match.
Boom!
The beams collided midway. Zod's descent shuddered to a halt as the two streams of energy locked against each other, grinding, crackling, neither giving ground.
Bzzzt! Bzzzt!
The stalemate held for three seconds.
Infinite Superposition. Double.
Jack's heat vision surged. The power output didn't just increase—it multiplied. His beam swelled, devouring Zod's like a river swallowing a creek. The balance shifted visibly, Zod's crimson lance shrinking as Jack's grew.
Zod gritted his teeth. Every ounce of his will poured into maintaining the output, veins standing out on his temples, muscles locked rigid. But exponential gaps couldn't be closed with effort alone.
Jack's heat vision slammed through the last of Zod's resistance and struck him full in the face.
The General let out a strangled grunt. Wisps of white smoke curled from his scorched skin as his body went limp, plummeting from the sky like a dead weight.
Jack dove after him.
He landed on Zod's back mid-fall, one boot planted between the shoulder blades, riding the unconscious Kryptonian like a surfboard. Wind howled past his ears. The ground rushed up to meet them—buildings resolving from smears into shapes, streets becoming visible, the geometry of a city taking form.
Metropolis. They'd drifted during the fight.
In the city's heart, a massive black machine dominated the skyline. The World Engine stood thirty or forty stories tall, supported by four spindly legs that bit into the pavement. A column of blue energy erupted from its core, drilling straight down into the earth. Somewhere on the other side of the planet, its twin was doing the same—the two beams meeting at the world's core, beginning the process of terraforming Earth into a new Krypton.
The Engine generated a localized magnetic field that wreaked havoc on anything nearby. Cars floated off the ground, drifting lazily around the device like debris caught in a slow whirlpool. The streets below were chaos—screaming civilians, abandoned vehicles, the acrid smell of burning rubber and ozone drifting up even from this height.
A squadron of fighter jets screamed in from the east, engines howling as they dove toward the World Engine on a suicide run.
They never made it.
The moment they entered the magnetic field, instruments failed. Controls locked. The pilots didn't even have time to eject before their jets slammed into the floating debris—cars, chunks of concrete, each other. Fireballs bloomed against the Metropolis skyline. Burning figures tumbled from the wreckage, trailing smoke as they fell.
"If the fire doesn't kill them, the impact will," Jack muttered, watching a pilot cartwheel past a skyscraper window. "Unlucky bastards."
He didn't move to help. Just adjusted his footing on Zod's back, angling their descent toward the World Engine.
"Three... two... one."
CRASH.
Zod's body punched through the World Engine's outer shell like a bullet through paper. Jack rode him straight down, metal screaming and sparking around them as they tore through layer after layer of Kryptonian machinery. The blue energy column flickered, sputtered, and died.
They burst out the bottom in a shower of debris and molten metal, and Jack landed lightly on the buckled pavement beneath.
Silence. The hum of the World Engine had stopped.
He looked down.
Someone had been standing beneath the machine when it came down—one of the two Kryptonians who'd been operating it, now pinned under Zod's unconscious bulk. Still alive, somehow. Struggling weakly. Unluckier than the pilots.
"Since you're already having this kind of day," Jack said, crouching beside the trapped Kryptonian, "let me help you out."
He kicked Zod's body aside, gripped the Kryptonian's head in both hands, and twisted.
Snap.
The struggling stopped.
"Trajectory!"
A heartbeat passed. Then a streak of yellow lightning tore through the ruined street, resolving into a woman in a red uniform. She stopped in front of Jack, vibrating slightly, ozone and burnt asphalt clinging to her.
"Send this back." Jack nudged the fresh corpse with his boot.
Trajectory scooped it up without a word and vanished in another crack of lightning.
Jack had heard the Aerie touching down at the military base while he was still in the upper atmosphere. Superman's hearing really was something else.
He turned, grabbed Zod's collar, and started dragging the unconscious General across the rubble.
A figure appeared directly in his path.
Faora-Ul. Returned from wherever she'd vanished to.